Restoration of the Bathroom Tiles and the Bath Room

The Bathroom, which fortunately had been saved from alteration during the centuries, had however been used for several activities, other than bathing. At one time the deep plunge bath had been floored over. This had impacted on the floor level tiles. In other parts of the Bathroom some of these Anglo/Dutch tiles were also chipped, cracked, missing or blown.

It was decided, to make an appeal for money to restore the tiles and floor. The general public proved to be most generous! We raised enough money to ensure that most of the work we wished to have done could be carried out. After considerable searching to find someone who was skilled in this type of restoration and in whom we had confidence, we found Leslie Durbin, working at the Jackfield Conservation Studio.

Although Leslie had restored tiles for the Victoria & Albert Museum, we were somewhat hesitant about letting the tile pieces out of our sight so initially we gave her pieces to restore just six tiles.

In the two photographs, you can see one of the five different vase type tiles that Leslie restored in 2001. We were extremely pleased with the result and asked her and her assistant to come to Carshalton to work in the Bathroom. They worked on the restoration of the Bathroom tiles for a week in March 2002.

Two photographs show the north west corner of the bathroom. In one photograph the restoration work has just commenced. Where tiles were missing, the gaps had been filled with cement. This had to be removed before the restored tile could be put back in its correct place. The other photograph shows the area of tiles restored before cleaning the marble floor.